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OSD – How to test Upgrades, Refresh and Replace on real computers with real data, without making users angry

Today during class we had a discussion about testing things like upgrades, refresh and replace. It is of course possible to deploy a new virtual machines with all apps, but that kind useless, that is always going to work, so we need another solution…

Clone it

Yes, that is going to be the best and easy approach, you basically take a copy of the machine and try it on that. This way you have a “dirty” machine that contains real apps, real profiles and real data. If you use VMware you can use the P2V tool and if you use Hyper-V you can use Disk2VHD from SysInternals.

Reboot the physical machine, log in as Admin

Create a local admin account that works to logon even if the machine is disconnected from the network

Download and run disk2vhd, save the VHDx file on a file share or disk

Build a new VM and use the vhdx file you saved

Start the VM, disconnected from the network

Disjoin from the domain and rename

Connect back to network

Start and join to the domain

Move it to a regular OU

If you have a ConfigMgr agent, you might need to remove, or reinstall, or reset ID, same goes for other agents, like Antivirus